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Learn What Makes Scorpion Floor Jacks a Great Tool

To repair a heavy-duty truck or trailer properly you need two things; parts that reduce your cost-per-mile and great tools. But without great tools, even a simple repair can take much longer than it should, it can be very frustrating and put people’s safety at risk.

Learn about a tool that will keep you safe and save you time and money.

It was interesting listening to Alec talk about how the jack tools have not changed in decades. I was surprised when he said the following:

“We are in the Truck Jack business and what we noticed when we started our company was the products that people were using were very old in their design. Most of the products have patents dating back to the 1920s and some even earlier than that.”

Alec’s company was founded in 1999 and originally was a design firm turned manufacturer. They primarily made rolling bridge jacks that are accessories to lifts that can lift between 6,000 and 50,000 pounds. They have two engineers on staff.

They sell through a distribution channel and the ultimate user is a repair technician that works in a truck shop, a truck lube shop, a fleet, or a municipal maintenance facility. Really anyone who lifts trucks and works on the ground repairing them. Often, they are removing tires, doing brake work, or lube work.

The name Scorpion came from the look of the floor jack. It’s black and uses a vertical handle that looks like a scorpion tail so after a brainstorming session they landed on the name Scorpion.

One of the hurdles they encountered when they launched this tool into the marketplace was push back from the technicians. If you know the heavy-duty truck industry you know that they are late-adopting and many of the “old school” technicians had never seen a jack that could lift the entire front or rear of a truck and not require jack stands. The way that they have lifted trucks for decades is one corner at a time with bottle jacks and using jack stands for safety. It has been a big adjustment but once people use the Scorpion, they love it.

Alec explained how this tool is not only safer, but it will save time and make money for the repair shop. This is his explanation of how a tool like Scorpion can accomplish this:

“We have done reverse Return on Investment (ROI) calculations based on hourly wages of technicians and how long it takes to lift the truck and we have found that shops save so much time over the course of a month that the jack pays for itself in 3-months.”

These days if you get 6-months out of a jack you are lucky. The Scorpion is rated for 10-years. When you combine the capital waste on faulty equipment with the productivity advantages of the Scorpion it really is a slam dunk.

Earlier I mentioned that the Scorpion does not require the technician to use jack stands. Listen in as Alec explains at the 13:27 mark the path they took when designing the Scorpion and the safety considerations that went into the design.